This chart below shows the top ten geothermal countries with the world’s highest installed generating capacity, of which four of the five countries are located in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” area and comprises the 1 GigaWatt Country Club in 2019,
Karl Gawell et.al (2013) in Lester Brown’s report (2018) calculated that the heat at the upper six miles in the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times as much energy found in all today’s discovery of world’s oil and gas reserves combined. Despite this abundance of the geoheat energy, now only 15,000 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity have been harnessed worldwide. Partly because of the dominance of the fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal, hydrocarbon) industries, which have been providing cheap fuel omitting the indirect costs of greenhouse gas release from the fossil fuel fuel burning, relatively very little has been invested in developing the earth’s geothermal heat resources.
MYTH : Geothermal Power Plants Visibly Emit Suspicious Smoke from the Earth! FACT: The visible plumes seen rising from water cooled geothermal power plants are only water vapor emissions (condensed steam), not smoke, and are caused by the normally operated evaporating cooling system.
No combustion of fossil fuels occurs to produce electricity at a geothermal facility. Air cooled systems emit no water vapor, and thus blend easily into the environment. In a water cooling process, 50% or more of the geothermal water that enters the cooling tower is emitted to the atmosphere as water vapor, while the remainder is recycled back into the geothermal reservoir. Geothermal water vapor emissions contain only trace amounts of the pollutants typically found in much greater quantities in coal and gas power plant emissions. (geo-energy.org)
We now have the safely proven technologies to build a new, cleaner (carbon free) energy economy, one that is not climate-disruptive, that does not pollute the air with greenhouse gases and that can last as long as the sun itself (renewable). Mobilization towards using clean, sustainable and relatively cheaper renewable energy such as geothermal requires decisive actions on a global scale.